Sugarless Girl
by kanashii-bb
Summary: A dramatic account of young girl infatuated with a man much too old for her and a young boy in love with a girl much too detached for him. Sakura returns to her hometown in hopes of recovering herself, along the way she finds trusting people can result in weird warmth and disillusionment.


Wow, long time no write, or whatever. Gosh, it feels like forever since I've set foot in the realm of fanfiction (roughly about 3 years, or almost).  
Alright, so this story is going to be very, very dramatic. You will grown to like some characters, I hope! And yes, I'm sorry, but Sakura is going to be a little  
out of her routinely likable characteristics, just for a bit, but if you're willing to give this a try, she'll make a comeback ^_^

some of this might seem confusing, like the plot, and who is she talking about? and etc, but don't worry! if everything goes smoothly, and if  
anyone has interest in this story, it'll be okay and you'll understand things, I mean this is just the first chapter, and a muddy one at that.

do people still do disclaimers? not sure, but Card Captor Sakura does not belong to me, but of course, to CLAMP, you know.

!

* * *

Chapter One: Fourteen

_10 July 20XX_

_How content are you? I had a boy that wasn't you touch my thighs today and it felt like the end of the world.  
I must have listened to Loveless about five times to keep every secret in me from tearing me apart.  
I don't trust people that find apart and a part interchangeable, it's a not so much a pet peeve as it is something I'm vulnerable about, like being ticklish while playing Mario Kart. I'm not very content because I found a girl I'd happily trade places with, the truth is, she's suffered more than I have and her eyebrows don't furrow when she's reading subtitles._

_-SK_

There's something abnormal in the anatomy of a shared journal. If it were anything but a journal, it'd succumb to psychological disfiguration.  
A little cinematic, but in all, an Italo-Horror film you'd continually press your friends into consuming to no avail (that is, until you're high as a kite but soon realize crowds and neon blood are about as conscious revealing as air conditioning is to freshly showered, bare skin). A shared journal is, of course, something to keep intimate. Here you are though, you're listening to Interpol, _but it's been years since you've listened to Interpol god what's the matter with you_, during study hall, hovering over the lankiest sentences because even a girl, rather this girl, telling you what film she fell asleep watching should remain between paper and dearly beloved conscious, occasionally in feud with frictional void in your jeans. Do not think that.

_I know you've supported me for a long time; somehow I'm not impressed._

"You've got five minutes, so wrap it up"

There was the routine, desks were scrambled and the girl who sat beside me hid a giggle into her palm, causing coy to take a grip of her eyes.  
Ouch, it said though. Tomoyo Daidouji was well known for her social status, not just in a sweaty locker room, but in a tearoom as well.  
A glimmer of Yamato Nadeshiko but, nowadays, even the stiffest of men move on (or at least, at my stiffest I can).  
You can pick the whitest, purest flower in the field and it will still wilt: you've summed up Tomoyo Daidouji, fair and square.

"Hey, Li, do you think you could get your obnoxious books out of the way, no, I get it, they're casually spilling out of your backpack but you know you read, um, Jacques La..can for fun and so does everybody else, so, will you?" I'm sorry my reputation is in shambles and I smell like dirt and that you smell like broiled potatoes, sometimes miso soup. Unfortunately, I'm no thinker of tender thoughts, you can laugh all you want but I'm just dirt like you and everybody else.

"Sure thing, Meiling" a sigh just scathed from my mouth but without fail, was overly reflective on her own face.  
Meiling Li is just three inches in height away from becoming a nightmare, but a reoccurring one, so it's almost like home.

"So, that movie you lend me, I really liked it…it was, dreamy, I guess? Or not really like dreamy but I guess I mean,"  
she had a fidgeting habit of pretending to look around for her words but really just wanting whoever she spoke with to add on.  
When we were six she said she had stage fright minus the stage and was perpetually digging up words in her throat, all the while burying others.

"Is that a thought fizzling out of your mouth?" but now she's seventeen and I'm an impatient pseudo-whatever.

Rolling her eyes she left her word search for a bigger fight and pushed her desk in its original spot. For the remainder of the class period, Meiling squinted at the board and avoided my underdeveloped insults. "The first time I tried watching Doctor Who my sister walked in on me during…"

"Oh god, Syaoran"  
Suppose it would be easier to rephrase the direction of those insults, even if my self-deprecation is at such a tender and experimental age.

"Li, both of you, shut it, I'm trying to teach here" Terada called and then the class was a solid silence.  
He turned his back once more and I felt the moleskin beneath my Japanese literature textbook squirm.  
My mind followed and my hand agreed.

_15 October 20XX_

_I thought of your eyes and how they matched your velvet green dress on New Years. I felt the shadow of your hair on my fingertips but it disintegrates each time I try to remember, I have about a life left. To think you invite me in, to think your mind wandered through these pages and felt the imprint of my eyes on your beautifully crafted, bewitching sentences. Nowadays, the thought of imploding into nothingness is hardly out of emptiness but rather, out of touching your shadow and not your hair._

* * *

The road felt like condensed blur but maybe that was just her cloudy vision. She rubbed her eyes and yawned a yawn so blue and knitted with compunction.  
Could her brother tell her lips were a state of adolescent post-friction? She felt blue and she felt red and anything in between her thighs formed a deeper secret. Her hands were stained with leftover fabrics but these stains were only apparent to her.

Touya Kinomoto drove at a cautious speed because once more than a girl had hurt him.  
He grew to learn the importance of skin when it's against unpleasant surfaces, metal, scrapes, and scraps of lessons in gratitude toward living.

"I have a headache" slouched against the window in the backseat, Sakura spoke her first words in approximately two hours.

"Drink some water for now" Touya's eyes never left the road, although there was a thick air about having your younger sister draped in the backseat wearing only an oversized pastel pink sweater and underwear.  
_Sis-ter-com-ple-x_

Without another word, she scavenged a seemingly bottomless backseat floor, tossing and turning over blankets and bags and discarded film boxes, books, crumpled receipts, mindless physical embodiments of a seventeen and a twenty four year old genetically entangled coexistence.

"Got ya'" she sensed a familiarity in her grip on the water bottle and feigned indifference when it wasn't warm or pulsing.

The ride was filled with white noise coming from a neglected childhood the two Kinomoto siblings had insisted was nothing, and it really was just that.  
Past the middle school years, Touya's teasing had come to a nearly insulting halt.  
It wasn't a pause Sakura missed, but even the warmth of his dreaded pet names had once kissed her cheeks with aggravation.

"How many classes do you think I've missed by now?"

"In the semester or today?"

"Today, think of it like I'm supposed to be in class right now, what period would it be and how many would I have missed?" she pressed her forehead against the window and closed her eyes, imagining a desk fresh and cool to the touch and a rabbit-shaped eraser borrowed but meant to keep.

Touya skipped whatever street sign he had no concern with and glanced at the sister in his rear-view mirror. She felt lithe almost, different than the girl sitting in his backseat. Rear-view mirror girl had no dreams or desires and she only stared into the wavering pavement because it held a close compatibility to the colorless stiffness in her. But he knew better and there was nothing practical about the tangible girl in his backseat, when she wasn't mute she was a spur of charisma belting out ornamental sentences, a funny little unmoved thing, but sincere in the least.

"Touya, how many? How many do you think I've missed?"

He perked up and focused on what was ahead, pursing his lips like he normally did when creating scenarios, lies sometimes, and said, "you're in Japanese literature and it's not your favorite but you're taking down every word your teacher says, even his tepid jokes, next to you is Tomoyo, as she's always been, typically by request. Before that class, you had calculus; it's fine that you've missed it because you're normally calling it a 'haze'. Since it's still ten, you've only missed one class" in almost a bedtime story-like fashion, Touya concluded with optimism, hey, who knows, she could have missed two classes instead of one, what a hypothetical relief.

"I like it this time, except I haven't seen Tomoyo since middle school" continuing the bedtime story tradition, Sakura's eyelids gave into the ennui carrying her throughout the ride home. While in between the warmth of her half closed eyelids and the almost translucent humming of the road, she reached for her left shoulder and pressed her index finger into the soft, in her mind, heart-shaped bruise. It was a vague bruise, if it should even be called one, and in her sleep, announced her displeasure to the world contained in Touya's Volkswagen. "I told him I wanted it to hurt, idiot"

"Told who?" Touya took one look back at his slumbering sister, rolled his eyes, and sighed, "You can at least mention a name, as if it weren't obvious…"

There was about an hour left until Tomoeda, an hour of seldom contemplation but overall, preparation for all the old faces and the warming local markets, the few bars downtown seeding with ambiguity, grimy distrust, and the chalked up talk of the town:

_what's with the nymphomaniac middle schooler? Wasn't she expelled for seducing her teacher? Or was it the counselor? Did you hear though, she's back! And that brother, well, I suppose someone's gotta' stick by her, don't ya' think? Poor kids, really. A dead mother and a father gone missing, sometimes you gotta' just sympathize with these oddballs. I'll tell ya' one thing though, she's definitely not getting to my husband! What with him being the new counselor, no, not getting her dirty, little, porcelain hands on him. I mean…I'm only 26, which still accounts for something? Some warm affection? At least for the reassurance, he won't get straddled by some radiating legs, plump thighs, he's got plenty here._

The resentment had become grainy on his part at this point. His beloved 17 year-old sister had blossomed somehow, away from the wilting commentary, at least he had hoped by moving away. Of course, some folk just remain black and white about the world and it's inhabitants.

* * *

Syaoran felt an uncomfortable sickness his my brain by the end of school, this had become a routine, the dizziness of over thinking, or rather, overawed by a scent he had once in his life. He felt his guts turn over, he felt himself turn over. At the end of the day, Syaoran Li was all guts, no brain kind of man. Never mind that government was his last class, that was hardly a preoccupation, because he casually found himself tracing his fingers back to that dreaded journal's spine.  
It was thin, and he sometimes assumed she had modeled it out of her own narcissism, but the nausea always found it's home when he read entries fresh past their New Years encounter. Around this time she found allure in insects and used phrases like, "I feel as if I am…" spacing out the words until she managed herself into a composed reflection of who she assumed to be at age eight, blowing secrets into dandelions. Their last run in had been during the summer, a sly gentle being which allowed for the baring of her limbs, escorted by the baring of her fragmented nerves carefully tying her sentences together. Sakura had always been aloof to his stained cheeks, the very same stains that harvested on her lips, something that was essentially carried out as torture to him.  
His own torching torture on a humid July's day was all the sticky warmth he could hope for during winter. Since meeting up with her, Syaoran grew into the persnickety habit of jotting down any laced up daydream into that journal. Although, instead of keeping them laced up, it would just be more earnest to say they weren't (in the truest and purest sense, if deciding to respect the girl you like _and only the girl you like_ was two steps above internalized misogynistic hell).

"Li, please continue reading"

_If I don't see the word velvet in the next couple of sentences I'm going to convince myself into jumping out that window._

* * *

"Even if I did believe in God, which I don't, which wouldn't make sense if I did, would I even call him god? Its Kami isn't? Yeah, anyway, even if I did, we'd still have to pay for my medication" her rants rained on her typically indifferent cat, Kero, she felt an appeasing sigh in response to his own inevitable silence.  
Sakura adored his emptiness toward her distress and took it as a promise to never share each other with another.

"You're right money isn't everything" but those words felt like a leaded nothing on her tongue. Sakura twirled in her peach-colored sheer nightgown and wondered just how much of a creep Touya had been at 21. When you're 21 you're allowed to sleep wherever and with whomever you'd like, of course, with the readiness to carry on whatever consequence said limbs and eyes entail. Maybe it'll be that dependency she longed for in middle school, but more than likely, at the rate her romantic career was going, Sakura concluded all kaleidoscopic days of rose colored sights far into the distance of "oh probably never, I'll just adopt a few cats and marathon episodes of Twin Peaks, who cares, I mean if I had been John Keats I may have, but up until 25, by 25 I'd be good to go, god to go, good to god, dead essentially, something to do with god, celestial stuff".

"Oh Kero…I can't imagine a life for me, not that I wish for death, at least not at this very second…I've got some cookies in the oven, but sometimes…" her hands looked through the scattered pages on her desk, as if it had never been lifted from its original spot, as if it had remained sitting pretty and innocent in Tomoeda while she was gone. "It's like I just can't find a reason that isn't four hours away…and 10 years older" her pessimistic charm loomed into the corner of her eyes, just in time too, when her hands grazed the object of her affections. A Polaroid keeping one of her many secrets, the very regretful root of her youthful abandonment, perhaps the reason she felt isolated when she had the traits of a sweet and healthy powerful girl. The melodrama seeped into her nightgown and ran a race against her chest and discontent for her current body. On the one hand, Sakura Kinomoto, when detached from the terrible deeds that had led to her downfall, adorned herself with thoughtful paragraphs concerning the psychology of being, the philosophy of conversationalist charmers, what their motives were and how to outsmart them (she felt superior, on occasion). And still, weighing heavy on her other hand, on her left hand, Sakura still held onto the hand she manipulated into warmth when she turned 14. This hand means "I love you because it's bigger than yours, rougher than yours, it's seen days far longer than yours, lengthier than the field trip to the zoo, and how Touya took 30 minutes to pick you up from school, all that bundled up, and this hand is still in control, it will love you and protect you". She fit that into her brain when no one else could.

Selfish, possessive, she dropped the Polaroid in the trash bin and looked away, for the fifth time that day. But she always meant it, the looking away part felt easy, it was dramatic and detached, her two favorite and most easily worn sentiments. Maintaining this sentiment, a prolonged sense of commitment was something that made her uneasy. She could feel the icy touch of boredom and how fresh everything was when recycled. Just how should she recycle garbage within seconds? She suppose it took time but there was always that factor, patience. Patience looked like the boy she met on New Years. The unpolished gem, warmth she didn't know came at that age, not packaged at 5'11" and helping her sneak some boxed wine into her empty bottle of jasmine tea. It felt like pretense, drinking cheap wine out of a seemingly harmless bottle of tea bought at the 7-11.

_Looks like you could you some help with that_

_You're not going to tell on me are you? _

_And ruin the one bit of fun I've had all night? _

…_if you cover for me I'll give ya' a sip_

_Is this flirting? _

_No, but this is: hi, my name's Sakura Kinomoto, nice to meet you._

Her first interaction with Syaoran Li felt too pure to frame as a Polaroid picture. Not with whatever grimy thoughts she had assaulted her body with, not when she thought about _him_. Truthfully, any boy her age felt too good for her. Too laminated, too well groomed and behaved. Even the ones who smoked cigarettes and kept dirty magazines beneath their beds – do boys still do that? Or is everything hidden and sacred between screens and keyboards? You can just wipe those memories, the filth is gone and not one person can be held suspect, it's a given, though, that it existed. But who cares, everybody's doin' it and so it's just the norm, to be that sort of perverted. Not the kind Sakura aspired to be, nor the kind she felt suited for or that would save her.

"Do you think I'm losing it? I hope so, I feel once I've lost it, everything will go away, and he'll go away too. I'll be sitting on a bench with you and everyone I've ever known will care, will talk more, you know? Like, oh gosh, remember Sakura? She used to be so sweet. Poor baby, poor girl"

She felt Kero internally hiss at her, and he was right. Who was she to ask for pity? Or feigned care? That wasn't what she longed for. At fourteen she longed for a picket fence and red, red roses growing by them, blue skies and that loving _man_ waiting for her at home. At seventeen, she wanted to disappear, but she wanted _him_ to disappear too. She wanted Syaoran Li, if he cared to remember her, to live a long and blissful life as the one boy who touched the very same diary she had thought too dirty for anyone else but herself.

Sitting her on bed, her thighs felt the tingling memories of when that boy her age accidentally touched them. What a sweet, idyllic moment that was, one that almost reminded her of her lovely and empty thoughts at the age of ten.

What will I eat today? Did I make enough food for Touya's bento? I wonder what movie Tomoyo wants to see. I bet Eriol is going to ask her out!

Age ten felt miles away and seventeen felt concrete and echoing.

"I'm sorry" Sakura picked up the Polaroid from the trash bin and settled herself into bed, placing the picture beneath her bed, stashed away like the dirty seventeen year old boy she could have been.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.

Sakura didn't have to use her imagination to pretend she was sitting on a bench with the town murmuring her name and what she had become, just returning with her old classmates would solidify that status of discomfort. She wondered if she would walk into a classroom filled with the same old fourteen-year-old faces. She crossed her fingers and prayed everyone was still stuck in that age, just with wiser brains, heavier hearts.

She sighed her prayers and teased herself with the kindness of a New Year's dream.

* * *

Ahhhhh !

So very nervous if anyone got far enough through possibly this very boring chapter but if you did, feel free to leave a review! Feedback would be appreciated, and if there are any errors I overlooked, please let me know! Any confusion I am capable of clearing could be noted too! Thank you so much for reading, I'll try to have the next chapter up in about a week, I'm a little busy (a transferring college student so I've got some other more real life important deadlines to meet, heh). But if this receives some attention, I'll probably be a little more motivated ^.^ again, thank you for reading.


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